CHAPTER FOUR
COVIN
I woke to a rattling that sounded like a percussion band had taken up residence inside my head.
Surely I didn’t drink enough of the damn port to give me that sort of hangover.
My resident artist was rubbing off on me. It couldn’t be more than half an hour after daybreak—a truly dishonorable time to be awake according to the locals who considered rising any time before nine a.m. improper.
The moment I moved, the sound stopped. I strained to hear anything, but whatever made the noise, I had disturbed its origin. That bothered me on several levels and I knew I hadn’t finished the port off by mistake.
It had been a close thing after the way Lindy stretched in front of me. The lithe artist clearly had no idea how she looked, swathed in all those clothes and scarves that pulled and clumped to her sweaty figure. All that loose material hid a form curvy in all the right places and long and willowy in others. I suspected that, like me, Lindy got lost in her work and forgot to eat at times.
Perhaps the castle was the perfect refuge for both of us. The image of her in the shape of a human pretzel curled on the floor did nothing for my morning wood situation. I groaned, my hand drifting downward to grip my cock hard. When her mouth hit the floor the night before and she moaned into the carpet I nearly lost all control.
It had been too long since I had a reaction to a female—to anyone, my tastes weren’t limited to strictly one sex or identity—but the sounds and shapes she made on that floor were burned into my mind.
Lost in my daydream, I rubbed myself gently, a long groan drawing from my throat. So fucking close, enough to?—
“Did you hear it? Like a wounded animal! What the hell was it?” Lindy’s voice came from practically on top of me.
No, not her voice. Just her, climbing on my bed.
“The fuck–” I groused, ripping my hand from my cock and out from under the sheets. “Are you doing in my bed, woman?”
“Didn’t you hear that? Or was it your alarm clock? Do you have a bear in here?” She peered around and reached for the blankets, reading to check beneath them.
“No,” I said firmly, yanking them down. I blinked several times, clearing my eyes of grit. My vision blurred, then the creature of my fantasy became the real thing crouched on my bed right next to me. Brown eyes stared at me from beneath a halo of messy curls that hung about her head. Pink lips she’d been biting were wet and swollen and inviting. Their color matched the stain on her cheeks. “Gorgeous, what are you doing in my bed?” I muttered, snagging her waist and pulling her closer, albeit on top of the covers before I could think the process through.
She stopped—everything. Fighting, talking.
Breathing.
She definitely stopped breathing.
“Did you just call me gorgeous?”
I swept hair off her face with my free hand. “Yeah. Like this? You’re perfect.” Her fine skin dimpled beneath my touch. A shiver wracked her body as she stared back at me. Those lush lips parted as I drew her close enough to?—
“What the hell, Dustman. I need coffee before we do this shit.” She shoved at my chest.
The action achieved her absolutely nothing.
I stared at her, the corner of my mouth quirking. “You call me Dustman?”
“Yes,” she huffed, wriggling torturously against me. “Because of your books. And the brown suit. And the tower—” She froze as a groan ripped free of my throat.
“Stop moving, Lindy,” I rasped, clamping a hand to her lower back. “Or get off the bed. Alright?” I softened my voice, not wanting to scare her, but damn the girl could wriggle . That and the fact I must have ten years on her thirty something… I swallowed hard as she stared down at me and gave an experimental wiggle. Just to shit me, I swore. “Lindy…” I warned.
“Yes, Covin?” She shifted again, more sinuously this time.
I groaned. “You’re going to be my limit this holiday aren’t you?”
“Probably,” she agreed, and slipped off the bed.
“What?” I stared as she pranced to the entrance of my room—the one with the door not the hole in our walls. “What just happened? Weren’t you scared?”
She shot me a look over her shoulder, all dimples and come-hither eyes and bed mussed hair I wanted to tangle my fingers in and kiss her stupid.
Why didn’t I kiss her?
Answer: because I met her yesterday and we spent the whole time arguing.
Then she sucked the wind right out of my sails and followed up with a bitch slap for the hell of it.
“Because I know what the monster in the bed sound was, silly.” She laughed at me, all tinkling and not so innocent. “It was you.”
I’d been caught in the middle of my favorite fantasy about the artist in the bed next door and it turned out she was a goddamn brat.
That was okay. I could work with that.
I found Lindy in the kitchen with a fresh pail of milk a while later. She pottered about, cleaning and banging for no other reason, it seemed, than to make noise for herself. I leaned against the stonework watching her do her thing.
Finally, she raised her eyes and gave me a wave with her little finger.
“I found eggs. They seem to be safe.” She demonstrated, dropping them into water where they sank to the bottom, not an inkling of our previous encounter on her face. “You want omelets?”
That lack of reaction was a gut-punch. I cleared my throat to disguise my discomfort. “If you’re cooking. Got bread?”
“I found rolls. They’re a bit crispy. As in, they have bouncebackability factor.”
“That’s a word?”
“It’s a word,” she confirmed.
“I can work with that.” I nudged her shoulder. “Are you okay after last night?”
And this morning.
But we weren’t talking about that, apparently. The elephant in the room chose to stay invisible.
She shot me a look that told me I was clearly insane. “Of course I am, Covin. I don’t need a hulking man to save me.”
Interesting, as that last time she called my name before we said goodnight said exactly that. I kept that morsel to myself. No point inciting the beast this early.
“Good thing I’m not one of those,” I murmured.
“Not a man?” she teased.
“Not a hulk of any sort.”
“Point for you, Dustman.”
She’s scared of giant men. Noted.
Maybe scared was overreaching, but the way her shoulders stiffened during that conversation then relaxed as I made light of my masculinity—unintentional, I really didn’t give a shit—told their own story.
A story I wanted to know. That had been my job for the past twenty years and I had no intention of stopping just because heartache took me out of the game and relegated me into the realm of books, gathering, well?—
Perhaps Dustman was entirely too apt.
I scavenged for the rolls and some butter—thankfully I didn’t have to churn that myself—while Lindy twirled in circles and hummed like I wasn’t there at all. The corners of my mouth that had perpetually turned down for the past decade or so flickered upward for the second time in as many days.
This woman would drive me mad, I knew, but her brand of insanity might just be worth the risk to my own.
Besides, our strange, dual tenure was only for the next few weeks. What was the worst that could happen? A lot my mind protested, but I pushed the thought away, delving into the butler’s pantry. I tossed a stray potato peeler in my hand that I picked up for no reason at all as I perused the options.
And came face to face with a stack of all the salmon cans stacked end on end that reached to the vaulted ceiling.
I stopped. “Did, uh, you have a stacking fetish I needed to know about? In case you, you know, stacked stuff about me in my sleep?” I called, recalling the paint brush threat.
“Huh? What bullsh— I mean, what are you talking about?”
I smirked, covering the motion with my hand. It wouldn’t do for her to see that I’d caught her modifying her speech in front of me. No, I suspected that would end in a blow up of epic Lindy proportions.
I stepped out of the way and gestured with the potato peeler. “Taa-daa.”
Lindy stared much as I had a moment before. “How did you get them all the way up there?”
Well, that answered that question.
“I didn’t. I thought you might have.”
“Not that smart, are you?” She walked right up to me, placed her hand flat on her head and slid it forward to butt the knife edge of her palm against my chest. “I’m really not going to be able to flutterby my ass up there and do that. See?” She rotated in front of me like a rotisserie chicken while I watched, bemused. “No Tinkerbell wings.”
“I can see that,” I said, gravely.
“Ah, smarts.” She tapped my chest again, leaving a glow in the place she touched.
“That doesn’t solve the problem of where the stack came from. Because it wasn’t like this when I was down here yesterday.”
“Oh.” Lindy mulled on the problem for half a second. “Nope, got nothing.”
“Aren’t you curious?” I knelt, pulled my phone out and snapped a picture of the tins from the bottom up, then sent it off to a friend.
“Are you going to post it on socials?” she asked me idly, though her voice changed pitch halfway through.
“Does that bother you?”
“Me? No. I can barely work a phone.”
“You’re not that old, Lindy.”
“But I am entering my cottagecore stage.”
“We’re talking separate languages.” I shook my head. “I want to send it to a…friend. He’s interested in sculptures.”
“A friend who helps you with your work in dusty books?” Her vague gaze laser focused on my bullshit belated statement in an instant.
Shit, I should have come up with a better lie than that yesterday.
I knew on the spot I should have just told her the truth. In fact…
“I’m a professor at SoCal. History department.” Okay, so not the entire truth, but also not too far off it.
She stared down at me. “You live in California?”
Both of my eyebrows went up as I stretched, standing. “Is that a crime?”
“No.” She nibbled her bottom lip while eggs burned on the gas stovetop. “Just…”
The tins chose that moment to rattle. One by one, like a shiver worked its way along the row. And then, just as fast, they toppled.
Lindy screeched like a barn owl. Witnot’s resident artist grabbed the front of my shirt and yanked. We both stumbled back into the kitchen, tumbling out of the butler’s pantry and landed butt first—hers, not mine—on the black slate flooring.
“Are you okay?” I asked, or tried to ask, as the eggs his critical and smoke poured over us in a billowing wave that should have been reserved for an alchemist’s shop.
“Fucking brilliant!” Lindy shouted in my ear.
One hand covered her eyes from the oily black smoke that seemed to pour from nowhere at all as she tackled the frying pan, dumping it under the sink and turning the water on.
I groaned and pulled her back as steam added to the smoke.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
“Burn yourself?” I yelled over the incessant smoke alarm that would Not. Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
“Oddin—ieeeeorsss,” Lindy yelled at me, nodding as she gave me a double thumbs up.
“What?” I muttered.
She rolled her eyes and disappeared into the pantry, reappearing a second later kicking salmon cans about and holding a broomstick. One hand pointed to her mouth. “Get it,” she mouthed clearly.
I nodded and did as she commanded, hefting the stick and aiming for the button on the base of the smoke alarm. Two swings, a few misses and?—
Silence. So blessed.
“That was so fucking loud!” screamed Lindy in my ear.
“Yeah,” I muttered, blinking to push my eyeballs back in where I swore they had burst out of my face when she shrieked in my face.
When the ringing stopped I threw the nearest window up, letting in a gust of icy air.
“You think we’ll get snow?” she asked hopefully, her teeth chattering a moment later.
“Who knows. The rain is making it slushy out there. And we have to deal with the cow again.”
A plaintive moo called from the barn/stable area.
“Bags not,” called Lindy, liberating the broomstick and tucking it back into the pantry. “Oooh.”
“What?” I followed her and paused. My mind barely registered as I settled my hands on her wait and stared at the reformed column of salmon tins. “Promise me you didn’t do that?” I squeezed her waist just hard enough to elicit a squeak.
A really fucking cute squeak.
“Nope. But you can do that again.”
Damn, she was trouble. My kind, which was worse. Or maybe better.
I pulled her back against me, her body all soft curves in the right places to fit against my lean form as she offered me no resistance whatsoever.
The words poured out of me and I blamed the insanity of the situation. Or her. Or me and her.
Whoever we were together, it would be spectacular.
“Want me to fuck you upstairs while the ghost watches, Lindy?” I muttered into her ear for the pure perverse pleasure of watching her pink stained cheeks turn white.
“We have a ghost?”
I smiled into her eyes and dipped my head to brush my mouth over hers before either I lost my damn nerve again, or she could protest.
“We do.”